Saturday, March 2, 2013

Cultural diversity

Modern
societies like cultural diversity, preferably when it is far away,
reasonably photogenic and does not inconvenience them politically.
They also like to marginalize minority cultures and transform them
either into folkloric caricatures or into assimilated ghosts of their
former selves. During the last two centuries, modern civilization has
absorbed most of Earth's cultural diversity and is currently quite
busy assimilating or destroying the rest while multiplying the
subcultures in its midst. It is a typical case of replacing
geographical cultural diversity by internal heterogeneity. It had to
be expected from societies which had, until recently, accumulated an
embarrassing surplus of cheap energy, but that is still a bad idea,
and one which will become really problematic as our energetic surplus
dries up.

Contrary
to what many people think we aren’t a fangless, clawless maladapted
ape which only its intelligence saved from extinction. We are superb
long distance runners and walkers. We are very good at throwing
things at mobile targets – for instances sharpened sticks at
antelopes. We have a very good cooling system which makes us very
heat-tolerant and a remarkable eyesight which makes us highly
effective predators in an open or semi-open environment.

We are
tropical savanna animals, at home in steppes and prairies provided
there are at least a few trees in them but ill at ease in dense
forests, where a predator can strike without warning. It is not by
chance that we wrestled the world from our competitors at a time when
most of Eurasia was covered by cold steppes. The outcome would have
been very different in a warmer, wetter climate.

It is
obvious, however, that we don’t all live in tropical savannas. In
fact, a significant part of the human population lives in ecosystems
totally unsuited for our species such as swamps (where our cooling
system kind of underperform) or tundras (remember, we are tropical
animals). We have to some extend adapted our bodies to those new
environments but this remains limited. People living in cold
climates are lighter-skinned, not fur-covered.

In fact,
humanity has a very low genetic diversity, to the point it could
become a problem should a really nasty bug arise, and the diversity
which matters (for instance the prevalence of haemochromatosis in
north-western Europe) is most of the time totally unrelated to
today’s ethnic and cultural realities.

During
most of our history, we have adapted to new environments, or to
changes in our environment, by developing new technologies or social
devices. Thus, when the climate changed 12,000 years ago and the
herds which kept our paleolithic ancestors fed and clothed retreated
northward, the tribes of Western Europe adopted the bow, a weaker but
more accurate weapon than the spear-thrower, to hunt in the dense
forests which soon came to cover Europe. Their cousins in the
middle-east gathered around fields of wild cereals, changing their
social structure to adapt to their new situation.

This is
by now way a foolproof process. The native population of Kangaroo
Island, or, more recently, the Greenland Vikings failed to adapt to a
changing environment and went extinct, as did the first inhabitants
of Palau.

Developing
and maintaining a technology or a set of customs is costly and in
small populations even basic technologies can be lost. The natives of
Sentinel Island, for instance, no longer know how to make fire and
the Mesolithic tribes of Western Europe quickly discarded the
spear-thrower when reindeer were replaced by more elusive deer and
roes.

Indeed,
human groups tend to discard technologies they no longer need. After
the late bronze age collapse, for instance, the highly organized
Mycennian kingdoms were destroyed and replaced by a collection of
independent villages too poor and too small to need a bureaucracy.
The royal scribes became peasants and writing was forgotten in a mere
generation.

The
result has been a specialization of human groups, a trend reinforced
by linguistic and cultural drift – inevitable in a low-tech
environment – but also by our tendency, as social animals, to build
our collective identity around cultural markers. Of course mergers,
more or less voluntary, happen as does cultural diffusion but even a
cursory look at a linguistic map of pre-industrial Europe or of
pre-contact America will show that their effects have been temporary
at best.

A wave
of newcomers could unify culturally a large areas, as the
Indo-Europeans did in Europe, the Bantus in Africa and the
Pama–Nyungan in Australia, but they will soon fall to the combined
forces of specialization and cultural fragmentation.

The
advent of cheap and plentiful energy changed the rules of the game,
however. Long distance conquest and tribute extraction are probably
as old as empires, and in no way a Western specialty. Imposing one’s
culture in an ecosystem to which it was not suited was quite another
matter. European invaders could conquer the precolombian American
states, which, by definition, were located in areas suited to
agriculture. They could colonize the eastern seaboard which has
roughly the same climate as Western Europe. Permanently occupying the
rain forests, the deserts or the pampa was far more problematic.
Those areas remained under effective Indian control until very late
in the game. It was even worst (or better, depending from your point
of view) in Africa where diseases played against us.

Fossil
fuels, however, enabled us to fit the environment to our culture
rather than the other way around. This is not an uncommon occurrence
in nature and something very similar happens every time we flood a
meadow with manure. This sudden glut of nutrients favors fast-growing
weedy species which will soon smother out more efficient but less
profligate plants, leaving very verdant but quite monotonous grass
meadows. A similar process has been happening all over the world
since the beginning of the industrial age, causing growth-oriented
variants of European and East-Asian cultures to spread to areas
where, in normal times, they could not have thrived. It also has
caused the rise of a global meta-culture characterized by a common
faith in progress.

The
other, more specialized cultures, survive only in margins and should
industrialism have proved sustainable, they would have had to choose
between dying out and becoming a mere variant of the the global
culture.

We know,
however, that industrialism is not sustainable. Earth’s innards
holds only so much recoverable fossil fuels and we have already
extracted the best part of it. Production of crude oil has plateaued
and it is only a matter of time before other fossil fuels follow
suit. Ultimately our civilization will be left with only what wind
sun and water can provide. While this does not mean that all our
technologies will become unsustainable, our current strategy of
adapting our environment to ourselves clearly will.

Add to
this that the environment itself is likely to drastically change
thanks to our deplorable habit of dumping truckloads of CO2 into the
atmosphere, and it becomes quite obvious that cultural diversity will
come back with a vengeance. Western – and East-Asian culture will
have to retreat from areas unsuited to their preferred lifestyle, or
change so much in the process that it will amount to the same. The
poster child for this will probably be American desert cities such as
Phoenix or Las Vegas, but northern China or the Southern Spain are
prime candidates for such an evolution too. Whoever will inhabit
those areas two centuries from now will have to adopt the same
lifestyle as preindustrial desert tribes.

The
problem is that those who have kept the technologies, both social and
material, needed to thrive in ecosystem hostile to European or
East-Asian style agriculture are likely to be early casualties. Even
when they still form viable cultural units, they are too specialized
to survive intact the effect of global warming. Besides, they are
militarily extremely weak and would be destroyed without the
protection of modern nation states – even the Sentinelese, who have
made an habit of shooting down everybody sailing too close to their
island will be soon overrun when Indian policemen will stop
protecting them.

This
means that we will have to rebuild a cultural diversity anew by
acquiring skills and social habits adapted to ecosystems which do not
yet exist at the exact moment the few people who still master those
skills are on the verge of cultural extinction. Moreover, those
people won't profit in any way from our collapse for the world we
will left will be different enough that , to survive, they will have
to completely reconfigure their culture. The Inuits, for instance,
may still exist two centuries from now, especially in Greenland, but
they will be more likely to raise cattle than to hunt seals, they
will have horses, not sled dogs and the place of snow and ice in
their culture will have been seriously reduced.

Even so,
rebuilding cultural diversity is by no mean an impossible task. As a
species we are very good at borrowing technologies and cultural
features from our neighbors and calling them our own. Here in
Brittany we eat a very typical buckwheat pancake called “galette”,
yet buckwheat is a Chinese, which was never cultivated in Western
Europe before the XIVth century.

In fact,
the internal diversity of our own society, doomed as it is, can be an
asset in that matter. While I fail to see the point of most of our
subcultures, their sheer number means that there always will be
someone to document or perpetuate the technological and societal
skills of some half-forgotten tribe. Whether it will be enough,
however, is quite another matter as it means preserving a knowledge
which will be quite irrelevant to our everyday life until quite late
in the game. This implies a serious amount of geekery and
self-marginalization and definitely won't get you money or influence.

8 comments:

That'll be interesting here. Where most people live its similar to Europe, but still there are differences. It'll be very different than what the aborigines had, thanks to all the imported animals and crops.

Indeed, the main reason why the aborigines staid paleolithic was the lack of cultivable crop and animals apt to be domesticated. Imported crops and animals will change that and allow for far more complex societies, even in the desert or quasi-desert areas where a pastoral lifestyle will be perfectly viable.

Thank you Damien for a thorough scholarly review of the decline and likely rebirth of cultural diversity. Most observers miss the key point that the decline came about as a consequence of industrialization and cheap fossil energy. Once we pull the plug on cheap energy, the great reconfiguration will begin and it wont be just the Las Vegas cities that will revert to oasis sized outposts but all communities which are energy dependent that lack a resource base to support the inhabitants. The population will of necessity shrink to fit the environment as will the cultural configuration of the occupants. It would seem that large central governments will decline and the large nations begin to Balkanize which will begin to sharpen social diversity. Trade will of course continue but without globalization. It will be an interesting time and I wish we could live long enough to see it.

Damien, really thought-provoking and interesting, as always. Thanks. I think (hope) there will be some things that are retained: knowledge of germs, quite a bit of medical facts in general. I also think that in time pale white people like me will die out in Africa and Australia - cancer from too much sun; and black and dark-skinned people will die out in cloudy countries like the UK - rickets. There have been many cases of each condition in both areas, where the 'wrong' skin is there. There were reasons why certain body types and colours existed in some areas while others couldn't. At the moment, of course, we can get by -- supplements of vitamin D and sun screen.

I do also hope that basic medicine will be retained. It is certainly not energy intensive and basic hygiene, vaccination and quarantining diseased people can go a long way.

As for white people dying out in sunny, I'd say it depends why you mean by "white" and by "dying out". There is no sharp division of skin color but a continuum which gets diversely interpreted depending from the society. Most Frenchmen don't see Berbers as "white", but they themselves consider they are white.

Skin color seems to change relatively quickly at the population level. The first human European were dark-skinned when they left Africa (the first European were light-skinned, but they were not, strictly speaking, human) yet they became white at the population level quickly enough. The same is true for populations of North-Asia.

White skin genes will probably be weeded out of the gene pool in tropical areas, but that does not mean the light-skinned people of today will leave no descendants. They will just become darker-skinned, through natural selection or intermarriages.

"there always will be someone to document or perpetuate the technological and societal skills of some half-forgotten tribe. Whether it will be enough, however, is quite another matter as it means preserving a knowledge which will be quite irrelevant to our everyday life until quite late in the game. This implies a serious amount of geekery and self-marginalization and definitely won't get you money or influence."ha, ha, well said, especially the part about no money or influence. I became interested in Eskimo and Aleut kayak construction a few decades ago and wrote a book about how to build an Aleut Kayak. This book had eventually gotten me invited to the Aleutian islands to teach kayak building there. The curious thing is that there really isn't much interest among young people in the Aleutians for learning their own technology which more or less stopped being practiced by 1950 after WWII. Young people see their own culture's technology as irrelevant in the petroleum fueled economy that they are living in now. However, for whatever reason, there is a fair amount of interest in ancient kayak technology among modern-day recreational kayakers. I doubt that very many of them see themselves as preserving a technology that might be useful in a petroleum starved future, but whatever their interest, it is preserving a technology in a subset of the population. An interesting trend in many of the native communities of Alaska is an attempt to teach young people subsistence food gathering skills. This often puts native groups into direct conflict with state and federal game and fish regulations but the trend is significant because it signals recognition among the native groups that their culture and local survival skills are worth preserving in spite of the fact that these skills are marginalized by the mainstream petroleum intensive culture.